The Time-Squeeze in American Families:
From Causes to Solutions

Marin Clarkberg
Cornell University

The Great Structural Lag

First, sociologists like Matilda White Riley have developed the idea of a
structural lag. She argues that social institutionsas
habitualized, sanctioned and legitimized patterns of actionare resistant
to change. When demographic, social or economics conditions change
rapidlyas weve witnessed with the explosive increase in married
womens labor force participationthe relatively entrenched nature of
social institutions means that a mismatch develops between existing social
structures and desired or socially optimal practices.

In the case of paid work, we can point to, for example, how the
restructuring of jobs, which occurred in the wake of the Great Depression,
continues to the shape work today. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 is a
case in point. Among other things, the FLSA defined the standard 40-hour work
week and mandated special overtime compensation while exempting professional
occupations from its purview. The FLSA is perennially touched-up but its
character remains fundamentally unchanged over sixty years, despite both a
massive shift from breadwinner/homemaker to dual-earner families and, with
increasing professionalization, an increasing proportion of the labor force
exempted from its protections. As a result of this and other forms of
institutional inertia, organizational policies and expectations regarding work
hours are predicated on an outdated template where privileged professionals can
be assumed to have a wife taking care of home life.